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VM Overrides (and vCenter)

Now I’m not a big fan of virtualizing vCenter, not to say I don’t do it, but when you do you should use VM Overrides to make your life a little easier. The benefit of VM overrides is that you can better control which host runs vCenter.

When you create a vSphere DRS cluster you can override the default automation behaviour of the cluster on a per VM basis. You can find VM Overrides at the Cluster level under Configurations.

Click Add which will bring up the VM Overrides window.

Select the VMs to override settings. In this case I want to override the DRS settings for vCenter.

The next window will allow for the overrides. For vCenter the Automation Level should be set to Disable. The VM restart priority should also be set to High.

This will in effect disable the vCenter VM from participating in DRS and lock it to a particular host. The host that you choose to run vCenter on should be noted down for disaster scenarios. The High restart priority will also allow it to start up before the rest of the VM (default is medium).

The Host Isolation response and VM Monitoring will be personal preference for each environment. Usually the type of storage connectivity and network configuration will dictate what these settings will be.

5 Comments.

I’ve trying to disable automation level on a VM using the vSphere API. Any ideas on how to do this ? I need to programmatically override DRS rules for specific VMs. I cannot find the correct object which allows me to do this. Appreciate any suggestions